Another "Lone Nut"
The suspect in Charlie Kirk’s murder is described as the pride of his family, a 4.0 student in high school, scholarship winner. A 22-year Mormon man, now attending Vo-tech school in Southern Utah. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Like many boys in this area, [the suspect] grew up hunting and was well-versed in the use of firearms, according to law-enforcement officials. Photos shared on social media show the family shooting rifles.” Supposedly “well-versed” enough to get off a 523-foot single shot striking Kirk’s neck.
Murray Rothbard spoke often in class at UNLV about the “lone nut theory,” questioning if the many political assassins acted alone. In 1972, Rothbard wrote,
John F. Kennedy; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Robert F. Kennedy; and now George Corley Wallace: the litany of political assassinations and attempts in the last decade rolls on. (And we might add: General Edwin Walker, and George Lincoln Rockwell. In each of these atrocities, we are fed with a line of cant from the liberals and from the Establishment media. In the first place, every one of these assassinations is supposed to have been performed, must have been performed, by “one lone nut” – to which we can add the one lone nut who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the prison basement.
The hand wringing on TV is constant about the darkness that has overtaken America. The divisiveness has never been so acute. “The term ‘civil war’ was mentioned on Wednesday more than 129,000 times on the social platform X, according to an analysis by The New York Times. On Thursday, it was mentioned at least 210,000 times. That was up from a daily average of around 18,000 in previous months,” reports the New York Times.
This all sounds familiar to Rothbard students. Writing in the Libertarian Forum and republished on mises.org,
It is not enough that our intelligence is systematically insulted with me lone nut theory; we also have to be bombarded with the inevitable liberal hobby horses: a plea for gun control, Jeremiads about our “sick society” and our “climate of violence”, and, a new gimmick, blaming the war in Vietnam for this climate and therefore for the assault on George Wallace. Without going into the myriad details of Assassination Revisionism, doesn’t anyone see a pattern in our litany of murdered and wounded, a pattern that should leap out at anyone willing to believe his eyes? For all of the victims have had one thing in common: all were, to a greater or lesser extent, important anti-Establishment figures, and, what is more were men with the charismatic capacity to mobilize large sections of the populace against our rulers.
Writing about the two assisination attempts on Donald Trump’s life, Lew Rockwell wrote that we are supposed to rule out a coordinated group attempt, but instead, “we are told by the leftwing mass media, we must not think so. Each assassination attempt was the work of a ‘lone nut,’ and the lone nuts had no connection with each other. To think otherwise would be the product of a ‘conspiracy theory of history,’ and that this is the sign of paranoia.”
Rockwell continues,
Some people, although my readers won’t be among them, might object; “Can Americans really be so evil that they would use assassination as a political tool? Oddly enough, these same Americans have no difficulty in accepting that political assassinations elsewhere in the world are the products of conspiracies. But somehow America is different. This is the illusion of American exceptionalism. This notion is false. Americans are governed by the same laws of politics as everyone else, and one of these laws is that the state is a criminal gang. American politicians aren’t guided by high-minded idealism.
If Murray were here, he would ask Qui Bono?
